Horological Meandering

cazalea
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Air Force Pilots; their watches and clocks, Part 5

Hello flight-loving PuristS,

Here's a bit more about Capt. Brownie Parker's flying experiences in the USAF in the 1950's and 1960's:

THE F-104 STARFIGHTER

The F-104 Starfighter was designed by Clarence “Kelly” Johnson, unarguably the most talented aeronautical engineer in the history of aviation. Kelly Johnson’s boss at Lockheed aviation once said, “That d_ _ _ _d Swede can actually see air!” He is responsible for the design of the P-38 Lightning, P-80 Shooting Star, F-104 Starfighter, U-2 reconnaissance plane, and the SR-71 Blackbird. The latter three aircraft were designed in the famous, totally-secret “Skunk Works” at Lockheed’s Burbank plant. The Skunk Works was so named because it was situated next to a plastic factory, the stench of which made the rooms in the production offices almost uninhabitable.  

Nicknamed “The Zipper” by the pilots and “missile with a man in it” by some newspaper reporter, the F-104 was unique in many ways and is an absolutely gorgeous airplane. Like a red Ferrari sitting at the curb, this airplane has the appearance of doing Mach one just sitting on the ramp. Nothing else can match its look of pure single-minded aeronautical purpose…speed, speed, speed. Wingtip to wingtip, it is a smidgeon under 22 feet wide, eight feet less than what it takes to make a first down in football. You can pretty much divide that measurement into thirds: each wing is a bit over seven feet long while the fuselage is a little less than eight feet across at its widest point where the engine air intakes protrude. The shape of the wing is trapezoidal, meaning the leading edge is swept back and the trailing edge is swept forward.  

One item catching your eye when you first look at the “Zipper” is the wing’s ten degree negative dihedral, meaning the wings droop downward as they leave the fuselage. For purposes of roll stability, the wings of most aircraft employ “dihedral,” which is an upward slope, but the F-104’s wings angle in the opposite direction, “anhedral.” This is probably more information than you want. Where the wing connects to the fuselage, it is a mere 3” thick, tapering down to 1” at the tip. This leaves no room in the wing for fuel storage.  

One of the most amazing features of the F-104 was how sharp the forward edge of the control surfaces were. In order to lower the drag coefficient of the aircraft, both the wings and tail surfaces come off the production line with razor-sharp leading edges. When a plane was in the hanger for maintenance, the mechanics would check for nicks in the leading edges. If one was found the maintenance guys applied a honing stone to it. These sharp edges constituted a hazard for those working around the airplanes, so when the planes were parked on the ramp, protective guards were slipped over the leading edges of the wings. The early astronauts used a rocket assisted F-104 for training. If you can locate the publicity photo of the first class of astronauts, you will see one of them wearing a large bandage on his forehead, the result of carelessness during a pre-flight inspection. 

The wing has leading and trailing-edge flaps; half flaps for takeoff and full flaps for landing. You might guess there is a nominal amount of lift inherent with a wing that that is so thin and small. This amount of wing area presented a problem when the aircraft was slowed to landing speeds and started to lose lift. In order to overcome this problem, Kelly Johnson installed a “boundary layer control” system (BLCS) in the trailing edge of the flaps. As the flaps extended from the “takeoff” position down to the “landing” position, air was taken off the engine and exhausted out over the trailing-edge flaps to energize airflow and thus improve lift. Who else but Kelly Johnson could have thought of such a thing? 

Kelly Johnson selected the promising General Electric J-79 engine to power his new airplane, but it was not ready for use when the first two F-104 prototypes came off the assembly line. The J-65, a British-made product, was available at the time, so they made adjustments to fit it into the airplane. The results were disappointing, so production was held up until the J-79 was tested and ready for use. Johnson wanted a Mach 2 airplane, and General Electric made it happen. 

Once the J-79 engine was installed, the Zipper came into its own. The engine would later be used in a number of front-line fighter aircraft, as well as Strategic Air Command’s Convair B-58 Hustler. 

Unlike the F-100 and other larger fighter aircraft, the intakes on the F-104 are proportionally small. When an aircraft is in the development stage, the manufacturers need to examine the compressor blades at the front of the engine on a regular basis. An interesting sidelight is that Lockheed had a cadre of “little people” they hired just for this purpose. I know that when I was in Europe I would occasionally witness our mechanics sliding down the F-100 intakes to inspect the front of the engine. I don’t know what they did at George; I never saw any “little people” on base. As an aside, when I signed up for the flying training, the minimum height was five feet eight inches; not sure how tall you could be and still pass the physical. I do know that the smaller guys like me (5’ 9”) were more comfortable in the F-104 than the big guys. 

Because the F-104 weighed so little to begin with, it meant that when we had burned our fuel down to the point where we had 1600 pounds of JP-4 (basically, kerosene) remaining, about 235 gallons, the thrust of the engine was equal to the weight of the airplane, something distinctive among the century-series aircraft and making for explosive acceleration. There were four separate fuel rings installed in the rear of the engine, giving it a four-stage afterburner. When you first activated the afterburner, a very minimum amount of fuel was introduced by the outer ring. As the pilot moved the throttle forward, the other rings came alive one at a time. Compared to the J-57 engine, it had a very “soft” afterburner light-off, a gentle shove rather than a big push. The J-79 was the latest and best in the world at that time, and I only experienced two mechanical problems, both of which I was able to handle safely. 

Those of us who had flown the F-100 appreciated the fact that we were no longer plagued with compressor stalls. But the most satisfying attribute of the J-79 was the magnificent sound emanating from the back of that engine. Someone described it as being akin to the plantive refrain of an elk’s bugle. At certain throttle settings it was delightfully mournful. Please take time now to Google that on your computer: “J-79 sounds.” You could even flirt with a pretty girl as you passed by. By jockeying the throttle back and forward rapidly, it would go “woo woo woo”! Boys and their toys….  

No airplane is without its faults, and the F-104’s biggest problem lay at the tail end of this otherwise wonderful aircraft. As I previously mentioned, all afterburning engines require that the exhaust nozzles open and close depending on the amount of pressure being produced in the back of the engine. The J-79’s nozzles were hydraulically actuated using engine oil. The philosophy of using precious engine oil for this purpose rather than using a dedicated container of hydraulic fluid escaped us. I would guess it was meant to save space and weight. Once in a while the plumbing running from the oil tank to the nozzles in back would crack and spring a leak. A standpipe arrangement in the oil tank assured that the engine did not run out of oil, but once the oil quantity got below a certain level, it was no longer available to open and close the nozzles.  

Once the oil level dropped below the standpipe, the engine nozzles would drift to the full open position, and the only way to keep the airplane flying was to light off the afterburner. If it would not light off—and that was always a crap shoot—there was not enough thrust to sustain level flight and you were going no place but down. We lost a few aircraft to this problem until they installed a manual closure handle. It took Lockheed and General Electric too long to fix this thorny problem, and even then it was not a good one. The pilot had to actually notice the engine oil quantity decreasing and activate the closure handle without delay before the nozzles drifted open, and none of us was in the habit of looking at the oil quantity gauge regularly. This did not happen very often, and I was one of the fortunate ones not to have to deal with this. 

Pilots realistically expect that an aircraft fresh off the assembly line will have a few flaws that need to be corrected. Often as not, these defects do not manifest themselves until the plane has been in use for a while, no matter how extensive the flight testing has been. One of the problems with the early F-104s was a tendency for the nose to unexpectedly and very violently pitch up when the airplane was under high G-loads, at which point the plane would most often go into an uncontrollable flat spin. The problem occurred at high angles of attack (nose up) when the air coming off the back of the wing blanked out the horizontal stabilizer in the tail section. It was difficult to recover from a spin in this aircraft, especially if you were below ten thousand feet. This would be corrected in time, but a few airplanes were lost and once in a while the pilot as well. 

TAKEOFFS AND LANDINGS

Etain had been equipped with the North American F-86 Saber. This airplane was easy to love because of its looks and its very forgiving nature. If you were to query any modern-day fighter pilot which ’50s-era aircraft they would have loved to have flown, this gorgeous airplane surely would have been at or near the top. 

It was very difficult for the pilots to learn they would be abandoning their beloved F-86 and transitioning to the less lovely, less-forgiving F-100. This conversion had occurred a few months before we arrived. Not long after they checked out in their new airplane, one of the pilots at Etain pulled too many Gs in the landing pattern turning from the base leg to the final approach. He stalled the airplane, it turned upside-down, and he crashed. Sadly he was in no position to eject and was killed in the accident. You could muscle around the F-86 to the point of abuse and get away with it. The Sabre was a “yank and bank” kind airplane, unlike any of the “century series” fighters…meaning anything from the F-100 forward. 

If you watch documentaries of the two Century Series aircraft I flew, the F-100 and the F-104, you will eventually hear some “expert” refer to these airplanes as “dangerous” or “unforgiving.” I certainly never felt that way, nor to the best of my knowledge did any of my friends. There’s an old aviation adage, “It’s not the fall that kills you, it’s the sudden stop at the end.” 

One cannot be cavalier about flying anything that takes a person more than a few feet off the ground at any speed. The new breed of supersonic jet aircraft demanded our attention and required respect, but dangerous? No, we didn’t think so. The old guys at Etain would eventually lose their trepidation, but for a period of time the pilots would remain gun shy of the F-100, tacking on an additional ten or so knots of airspeed in the landing pattern, believing this would keep them safe.

More speed equaled less chance of the pilot stalling in the landing pattern, but landing with more than five knots of extra speed required heavy braking in order to get the airplane stopped before you ran out of concrete the end of the runway. The result was overheated brakes and more frequent brake changes. Worse yet, sometimes a pilot would be going so fast he was in no position to turn off the runway and had no alternative except to engage the arresting gear in the overrun; something akin to the way they stop Navy aircraft on a carrier but far less sophisticated. This would close down our only runway for about an hour while they freed the plane from the trap and reset the barrier. None of this was acceptable to the European Air Force Commanders.

The same sort of thing was happening at a number of other bases around Europe: too many hot brakes and too many airplanes ending up in the barrier. I am happy to say that in my almost ten years in the military flying I never had to take advantage of arresting gear; it’s a mite embarrassing to go off the end of the runway unless you have lost your brakes and have a legitimate need for it. The Air Force turned to North American Rockwell Aviation, manufacturer of the F-100, asking them if there was something they could do to rectify this problem. Their answer was to send their premier test pilot, Bob Hoover, to Europe.

Bob Hoover, known throughout the aviation world as one of the best test pilots in the business, was tall, thin, and possessed a ruddy complexion and bulbous nose. He could do things with an airplane that few people would even dream of doing. His goal was to show the pilots that the F-100 was an airplane they should not be afraid of, and he did it in a very spectacular way. Right after takeoff, with the landing gear and flaps down (“dirty”), he would do a 360-degree aileron roll. I cannot comprehend the skill necessary to do that. He arrived in the late afternoon and we went over to the officers’ club for the normal libations known to fighter pilots…

Mr. Hoover had had a “few too many” that night, arriving at the flight line the next morning a little the worse for wear. Nevertheless, he got in one of our aircraft, took off, and proceeded to do his dirty roll. As he completed it, the aircraft disappeared below a line of trees about a mile out. We all held our breath, thinking that any second we would hear a large explosion and see the tell-tale cloud of black smoke. But suddenly…there he was, slowly clawing his way back into the sky. He immediately returned, landed, and told us there would be another demonstration later in the day. Nap time! The only lesson we learned from Bob Hoover that morning was that it’s not a good idea to fly with a bad hangover, especially if you were doing a maneuver that required such precise flying. 

So here were five fledgling aviators who were not afraid of the F-100, eager to show off our skill and cunning, but with a couple of things stacked against us: First of all, it would have been very unwise for a squadron commander to assume that pilots with as few hours as we had accumulated in the F-100 were competent in the airplane. This is an assumption any unit leader simply cannot make. Secondly, the base meteorologist explained to us that the very worst weather in the United States at that time was in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, while the very best weather in Europe, in southern France, was worse than that! Flying in blue-sky conditions from the very beginning of our training, we had precious little instrument flying experience under our belts, and the weather in Europe in the winter is just plain awful.

In those days there were no helpful approach lights or strobe lights like you see at the approach end of modern airports; these would come later. Before the pilots could take off, the weather guy—“Stormy” was his nickname—had to forecast landing conditions of 500 and 1, meaning the bottoms of the clouds had to be at least 500 feet above the ground and visibility had to be at least one mile. When the weather was bad for days on end, which happened two or three times each winter, he would keep telling us that he could not give us the 500 and 1 forecast we needed in order to launch airplanes. 

After two or three days of sitting around we would begin to lean on him, desperate to get in the air. Eventually he would wear down and say, “Ok, I think maybe I can squeeze out 500 and 1, but barely. We would shout “hooray,” get in our machines and take off. Half the time when we returned to land, the ceiling and visibility were worse than forecast, and we would work up a real sweat getting on the ground. As soon as the first guy got down he would get on the squawk box and call Stormy. “You call that 500 and 1? What are you trying to do, kill us?!” The poor guy couldn’t win. For us Johnny-come-latelies who were new to the theater, the minimums would even be higher until we logged a goodly number of hours flying around in the soup.

The military method for approaches and landings during inclement weather is called Ground Control Approach (GCA). When the pilot is about ten miles from the end of the runway, Approach Control in the tower puts the incoming pilot in the hands of a non-commissioned officer sitting in front of a radar scope in a big, blue trailer located by the side of the runway. Once the controller positively identifies the aircraft, he starts a nonstop dialogue, literally talking the pilot down to the end of the runway, telling him how fast to descend (700 feet per minute), and which way to aim the aircraft in order to be in a position to land when he breaks out under the overcast. 

He also informs the pilot at what point he should have his landing gear down, and when the final flap setting should be selected, 1500 feet and 1000 feet respectfully. The controller continues talking until the pilot keys his mic and tells him he has the runway in sight. These corrections get more and more minute as you get closer to the runway, requiring miniscule corrections on the stick and rudder: “Increase your rate of descent 100 feet per minute,” or turn left one degree.” I had a hard time making such tiny corrections until my flight commander told me how he did it: “If you want to make a one degree change of heading or a small descent change, just the act of thinking about it will usually be enough.” 

When the weather was really stinko and landing looked like it might be a bonafide challenge, they would put the oldest and most experienced non-commissioned officer in front of the radar scope. His more mature and experienced voice gave the pilot just a little extra confidence: “Don’t worry, son, we’ll get you down.” It took a major part of that first winter’s season for us new guys to become really proficient, but it came. 

Thanks for Reading!

Cazalea